Saturday, 5 August 2017

Coming Of Age

Coming of age is a major theme in juvenile fiction. I just remembered two passages.

"She enjoyed the rest of the voyage, even after she had identified the change in him, the thing which had gone and would never quite come back. Youth."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Fifteen, p. 152.

"When the long jump from Ss'pode to Malis had begun, Jack had been on the down side of eighteen years old. When the alarm exploded and the Argo came off the Standing Wave, he had turned twenty. But it felt much more like eighty."
-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), Chapter Eight, p. 92.

Both Dominic Flandry and Jack Loftus come off age on long interstellar journeys.

Ensign Flandry is Volume I of the Young Flandry Trilogy, part of the Dominic Flandry series, which is part of the History of Technic Civilization.Mission To The Heart Stars is Volume II of the Jack Loftus diptych, which is part of the Haertel Scholium.

Addendum: In SM Stirling's Emberverse, pages become squires become knights. Coming of age is formalized.

7 comments:

And of the two passages you quoted from Anderson and Blish I liked best the bit from ENSIGN FLANDRY. I thought Anderson described Flandry's "coming of age" more succinctly and elegantly than how Blish worded it.

True, in Stirling's PPA the coming of age of would be knights is formalized. But stages like being pages and squires are also supposed to stand for acquiring increasing knowledge, skills, abilities, etc.

Attitudes towards childhood and beliefs about what it's appropriate for adults and children to do differ widely across cultures, but the stages of maturation are pretty universal.

You're a child until puberty, a "youth" or some equivalent for about four or five years after that, then a young adult. I strongly suspect that this is simply determined by our biology.(*)

(Neanderthals, for example, apparently reached physical maturity much younger than we do, and if they did, probably all non-sapiens hominids did.)

(*) for example, in the Old South of the US before the Civil War, plantation owners generally calculated that children were useless for work before about 6, could do a little between then and 12 on a gradually increasing scale, started to earn their keep at about that age, and became profitable after 16, and "full hands" after about 18.

That does clarify what I had in mind about "stages of knowledge." And it was interesting, what you said about Neanderthals reaching physical maturity sooner than Homo sapiens. Perhaps about age ten instead of about age 14 or 15 for us?

Now that was interesting! I hadn't known before that Neanderthals apparently reached physical maturity so much sooner than Homo sapiens children do. I would have thought that the Neanderthals, who were HUMANS after all, would have reached adulthood around the same age as H. sapiens.

Neanderthals were genus Homo, but not humans in the strict sense -- not sapiens sapiens. The last common ancestor was quite far back, about 600,000 years ago; both species evolved from H. heidelbergensis, Neanderthals in Eurasia and we in Africa.

We were apparently interfertile with Neanderthals, but only just -- the genetic differences were great enough that it would be uncommon and most of the Neanderthal genes resulting from that mixture were 'selected out' over time. Ditto with the Denisovians and other archaics that humans occasionally interbred with as they spread out of Africa.

Humans were probably behaviorally quite different from the other hominins.

I agree with what you said about the Neanderthals and other types of humans which co-existed, for a time, alongside H. sapiens. And "behaviorally different" included H. sapiens being more RUTHLESS or aggressive than the other hominins. As we see in Anderson's "The Long Remembering."

I have wondered what might happen if geneticists used Neanderthal DNA to clone them back into existence? How different or similar would they be, compared to us?